Posts tagged Hello

Remember when Facebook-app developers were revolutionaries? It wasn’t that long ago—and yet in the fast-moving world of technology, it seems an entire generation ago.

And like an aging urbanite looking to rediscover his youth, Facebook has entered its hipster era—self-congratulating, self-parodying, and yet archly self-aware of all its internal contradictions.

Less Movement, More Monetization

“Hey everyone,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as he jaunted onto the stage without fanfare Wednesday in San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center, kicking off the 2015 edition of F8, Facebook’s no-longer-occasionally annual conference for developers. His entrance was so low-key the audience barely had time to hush itself and listen.

These days, Facebook is trying to set expectations low and exceed them. It’s a far cry from the warrior days of the very first F8 in 2007.

At last year’s F8, Zuckerberg preached a new sermon of stable infrastructure—moving fast, maybe, but no more breaking things, at least where developers were concerned! The trouble with stable infrastructure as a rallying cry is that, well, it’s boring.

And with so many shiny objects to hold developers’ attention—so many platforms, so many APIs, so many SDKs—boring is deadly for a company like Facebook that depends on the kindness of others to fill its newsfeed, message threads, and other streams with headlines, photos, videos, and more.

So yes, Facebook had to remind people that it offers “better monetization” than competing ad networks. News flash: No one cares! Or at least no one wakes up in the morning, heart pounding and eyes blazing, looking to build an app on top of better monetization. It’s not a message that inspires anyone to create.

To Code, Perchance To Dream

Hence the offerings for dreamers:

You will soon be able to include “spherical videos” in your Facebook feed, allowing friends to click around and explore the world as you see it in a full 360-degree view. (Consider it a precursor to full virtual-reality views courtesy of Oculus VR, another recent Facebook acquisition.)

Parse, Facebook’s service that provides a back end on which developers can run their mobile apps, is extending its reach into the Internet of Things, making it simple to build software that connects to wearable devices and smart-home gadgets.

Facebook Messenger—increasingly just called “Messenger,” including its own URL—is becoming a platform, where you can inject your own apps to converse in quirky new ways, particularly in the form of short, jokey videos.

In the Wednesday F8 keynote, Parse CEO Ilya Sukhar faux-cheekily called out one app, Stacheify, which runs on his service and plugs into Messenger. It lets you add facial hair to your friends’ photos. Sukhar laid a mustache on Zuckerberg’s normally clean-shaven visage.

Mark Zuckerberg with a mustache. Consider it a metaphor for what Facebook is trying to do to its own image.

Facebook’s youth, so recently lost amid its immensely rapid growth to a billion users, an IPO, and a move to a new, more corporate campus, still lies in recent memory. There’s no more brogrammery breaking of things; that got packed away with other childish preoccupations. So how does this new Facebook, vast, complicated, burdened with the scars of experience, relate to the new generation of coders rising up and looking to build something new?

Like the hipster toying with his own facial hair, Facebook is trying to find some way to tweak its self-image. Sure, put a mustache on it. Whatever it takes to hack—and to persuade developers to hack alongside it.

After months of maneuvering to acquire T-Mobile, Sprint has decided to call the whole thing off.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal Tuesday, the wireless operator got more than it bargained for when it faced the complication of seeking regulatory approval. Sprint, now owned by Japan’s Softbank, discovered that was no easy feat, said the WSJ’s unnamed source. So it chose to put the kibosh on its acquisition aspirations.

T-Mobile may not be left alone for long. It reportedly stiff-armed a $15 billion cash offer from French telecommunications outfit Iliad in hopes of forcing it to sweeten the pot. Sprint’s withdrawal, however, may force T-Mobile to give Iliad a second look.

Either way, Verizon and AT&T—the two leading U.S. cellular providers—can take a breather, since it’s now clear that the nation’s third and fourth-place runners up won’t be joining forces to take them on. This is undoubtedly satisfying to AT&T, which had to abandon its own bid for T-Mobile in 2011 after the Justice Department raised antitrust concerns.

Changing Of The Guard At Sprint

Bloomberg, via Twitter, also reported that Sprint plans to announce a new CEO to replace current chief Dan Hesse, possibly as soon as tomorrow. It’s not yet clear whether Hesse is falling on his sword as a result of the failed merger, or if Softbank has had a change in the works for a while.

According to Recode, Sprint plans to name Marcelo Claure to the post. Claure, a Sprint board member since last January, is currently CEO at the wireless distributor Brightstar. Softbank holds a majority stake in Brightstar.

When I was a kid, my brother graciously taught me what a half-Nelson was. It was a lesson learned from our nightly wrestling matches over the remote control, which was essentially the scepter in our little game of thrones. I suppose that made our old tube TV the Lee family version of Westeros.

Part sport, part habit, fighting over a remote was a clear by-product of the way people watched television. Entertainment moved in only one direction, as anything flowing down through channels tends to do. So whoever controlled those lanes had all the power.

But television is evolving. Increasingly, it’s all about the apps now—browsable, downloadable, interactive TV applications. You can thank the swelling ranks of streaming services and devices for that.

The software applications they’re delivering to our living rooms are growing in number and prominence. And they’re starting to eclipse the passive, one-way broadcasts we once fought over for two-way, interactive experiences that let you share democratically among multiple users (née viewers) across mobile devices and computers.

It’s about time.

Changing Channels

We were long overdue for a change. In essence, television hasn’t changed for more than half a century. TV channels have always been pipelines for broadcasters to transmit programming along particular frequencies or bands in different regions. But as analog signals moved to digital, and those signals flowed through cable and satellite as well as the airwaves, channels remained channels.

Back in the 1990s, WebTV made an unconvincing argument for adding Internet TV to your living room like another channel, sort of. It was an idea before its time. But it succeeded in doing one thing: It seeded a notion that eventually grew up and became today’s app-fueled living room.

According to research firm NPD Group, the smart television business has begun to boom. In the beginning of 2013, there were 140 million Internet-ready TVs in American homes. By 2015, it will grow 44 percent, to 202 million. And by that time, nearly two-thirds of them will actually be connected to the Internet, compared to just 56 percent now.

How they connect is important. When it comes to television, “apps” are where it’s at, not ye olde “TV channels.” It’s just a shift in language, true—but it’s also a shift in thinking. Watching TV used to mean sitting back and absorbing whatever broadcasters—and later, cable or satellite providers—would deign to send through those pipes. It’s a passive experience, one that spawned mindless channel surfing and vegging out in front of the TV.

Thanks to smart TVs, streaming boxes and cheap TV sticks, users don’t have to sit around and wait for cable packages to update with new stations. We seek out and download apps. We browse, search or hit our playlists, so we can stream.

And we don’t just change channels anymore. We cast videos and songs, or switch apps, from one to another—bouncing between online videos, music, games, photos and home movies.

That’s not to say that there’s no place in this brave new world of television for passive viewing. Personally, as a long-time couch potato, I think tuning in (or, maybe, tuning out) has its place, and binge watching is certainly an acceptable substitute. But it may not look exactly the same for everyone. For instance, companies like startup QPlay—from the founders of TiVo—are working on merging passive viewing with streaming. Their premise: creating always-on “playlists” of online entertainment.

The Rise Of The Machines

Roku may be the only popular streaming TV box or stick that still calls its offerings “channels.” But make no mistake—they’re really apps. You download them. You can sync them. You can control them from your phone or, in some cases, cast them. (Users can fling YouTube, Netflix and PlayOn videos from their mobile devices to the TV.) You can even play Angry Birds on a Roku box.

As for smart TVs, the approaches vary widely. But since TV channels are pretty much the same, manufacturers can only differentiate their products by their hardware and apps. Some, like Roku’s upcoming Roku TV, will use proprietary platforms, while others, like Panasonic, use more open platforms, such as Firefox OS.

These products and platforms just scratch the surface. Fire TV, Chromecast and Roku top bestseller lists for streaming devices, along with Apple TV, whose maker finally stopped treating the box as a hobby after selling 20 million units for $1 billion last year. They’re joined by innumerable other TV dongles and gadgets, as well as full-fledged smart televisions from the likes of Samsung, LG, Sony, Vizio, HCL and others.

Clearly, there are numerous ways to stream to our living rooms now. And all that is powered by apps.

As if that weren’t enough, we may see another new contender before long: Google is rumored to be working on another streaming product, likely a new take on Android TV. No one knows precisely what that will be yet, but we’re pretty confident that apps will take center stage. Hopefully we’ll know more when ReadWrite goes to the Google I/O conference next month.

Streaming Apps And TV Networks: “I Wanna Be Like You!”

As for the app developers themselves, they’re stepping up to become bigger players in the TV industry in their own right.

Original content is like the new black, with Netflix’s Emmy award-winning series House of Cards grabbing the public’s attention, as well as hit Orange Is The New Black. Amazon has also been hotly pursuing original programming with a slew of shows, while Hulu trotted out original programs in its very own “Upfronts”—an event usually hosted by TV networks to parade new programming and celebrities in front of advertisers.

As streaming companies mimic the TV and cable networks, the latter have been working on their streaming offerings—from local apps like KTVU (which is the only way I get my local news these days; I never watch the TV broadcast) to online video from major cable channels like HBO.

The Game of Thrones purveyor has become such a breakout TV-to-streaming crossover hit that Amazon Fire TV’s omission of HBO GO marred its product launch. (Take a deep breath, Fire TV hopefuls: Turns out, Amazon will at least offer some “older” HBO programming via its Prime Instant Video subscription. The HBO GO app will reportedly follow later this year.)

Even cable operators—which were an online holdout for a long time—are now rushing to stream so they can complement, even save, their on-demand, pay TV services.

The Longshot: A Merging Of The Two?

It’s hard to talk about broadcast channels and streaming without bringing up Aereo.

The startup may have the ultimate solution for bringing these two content pipes together—that is, if it can prove that its model of grabbing over-the-air signals via tiny individual antennas and streaming them to users over the Internet is legal. If Aereo wins its Supreme Court case, it would be a rather huge blow to broadcasters, which charge cable and other TV providers to carry their stations.

TV channels could have an unlikely savior in Netflix as well. The streaming giant struck deals with a handful of cable providers to add its online video service to their set-top boxes, as part of their guides and channel lineups. The idea is to let users channel surf their way in without going into a menu to launch an app or switching inputs on their TVs. If others follow suit, it could re-position the software into streaming app channels, effectively blending the two.

And maybe that’s the best scenario, because it could preserve some measure of passive viewing while making streaming apps more convenient. On the other hand, the prospect of adding even more channels to the hundreds of standard ones could be the worst idea in the world. What’s crazy is that, on average, people only tend to watch 17 of the 189 channels available to them as it is.

There’s still a lot of uncertainty over how all this will shake out. After decades of stasis, television is suddenly a rapidly evolving space—fueled as much by ambition as advances in hardware and software. But through it all, one thing seems certain: The TV channel, as we know it, is destined to change.

Apple’s iBeacon, an indoor positioning system that uses the latest version of Bluetooth, holds much promise for mobile advertising and location-based marketing. Here’s how retailers and brands can develop a strategy to benefit from this technology.